


Freeway Robbers

by rokhal



Series: Pirates of the Caribbean: Age of the Uzi [3]
Category: Pirates of the Caribbean (Movies)
Genre: Betrayal, Enemies, Fountain of Youth, Frenemies, Gen, Gunshot Wounds, Heist, Jack the Monkey, Modern Era, Poison Gas, Revenge, gunfight
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-03
Updated: 2013-02-03
Packaged: 2017-11-28 02:41:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 6,355
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/669309
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rokhal/pseuds/rokhal
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When a heist goes sour, Barbossa finds his crew of miscreants is out for his blood.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Hit Me With Your Best Shot

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Fire away!

Rob hated Allen, and Allen hated Rob.

They were trapped together in a six foot box, with only the flitting fairy-lights of the roadside slat reflectors for company as they forged south toward San Francisco, only the whirr of the mildewed air conditioner and the hum of heavy tires to warm the sullen silence. Allen lounged in the passenger seat, his Kevlar vest stuffed behind him on a pile of food wrappers and pop bottles, his Glock in its holster tucked inside. Rob, glassy-eyed, was steering the armored truck with his knee.

Dozens of semi-trucks had passed them that night. Thousands in their careers. This one passed them, crossed back into their lane, then slowed, its rear safety lights glaring through their bullet-proof wind-shield. Rob glanced to the side and found another truck, trailer-free and fleet-footed, riding their left bumper. "Buddy, that's just rude," he grumbled.

"Whoa!" shouted Alan.

In front of them, the trailer's back hatch shuddered and popped, gaping at the top, held in place only by turbulent back-wind. The hatch hinged down suddenly, and telescoped into a huge slab of steel sparking over the freeway.

"Fifty feet," hissed the semi's driver's headset. He glanced left and right, watching the elephant-ear mirrors for any sign of the truck. Just a corner on the left side. He inched left, and the corner vanished, hidden by the trailer. "They're braking. Seventy—urk!" The semi nosed down, all its weight thrown forward as it slowed to match the truck. "Six feet left." They corrected, heading the truck off. "Fifty feet. Chaser's in position." Behind them, the trailerless semi had dropped back to ride up directly on the cash truck's tail. "Six feet right. Forty feet. Center. Thirty. Six left. Thirty. Center. Twenty, ramp at five. Five right. Center."

Rob swerved, throwing out a storm of curses, the semi trailer dancing in front of him, the truck behind them looming, closing, tapping their bumper. Suddenly the cash truck lurched onto the ramp, Rob braking frantically, Alan making braking motions with his foot. The front end rose. They were up—on—the road raced by below—then the featureless dark of the trailer. Their tires exploded and they sank to the rims. Behind them, the ramp whirred back up and latched them in.

"Nice knowing you," Rob hissed, struggling to find his gun in the pocket of the door.

"Bite me," snarled Alan. Twisted behind his back, his fingers slipped on his Kevlar. "Get up, get over here you effing sack of lead." A strap hooked on a seat lever. "I'll kill you!" he told the body armor. "Let go!"

Rob found his gun, patted his pocket for his phone, and tried to call for backup. There was no cellular reception inside the trailer.

Rob dropped his cell phone when a halogen lamp flicked on, blinding them from ten feet away, and they got their first and only look at their surroundings. The trailer walls were very close and tight. In front of them was a five-foot pile of dirt, presumably to stop the truck from driving forward. Behind that, in the last available space, was a plastic tent.

Like a survivor from a mutant apocalypse flick, a grubby man in an imposing full-face gas mask climbed to the top of the dirt pile and waved at them.

"REST YOUR HANDS IN FRONT OF YOU," boomed a voice. The man in the mask flinched at the noise, and Rob and Allen looked around for the source. Just overhead dangled a big black box, an amplifier. "CONSIDER THIS AS…FRIENDLY ADVICE. DROP YOUR PISTOLS OUTSIDE MY TRUCK."

"His truck?" asked Rob, meeting an equally bewildered road-kill-deer gaze from Alan.

"YE MAY FOLLOW THE PISTOLS WITH ANY AND ALL KEYS THAT OPEN MY TRUCK," continued the amplifier. The trailer jostled and slanted; the man on the dirt pile spread out his feet and surfed through the corner. The road grew bumpy, the truck leaned forward, and the trailer slowly stopped.

"CARLOS, GIVE OUR GUESTS A WAVE." Gas-mask-man waved again, and pointed to a big red air canister on a hand truck just outside the plastic tent. "THAT RED PIPE HOLDS FORTY POUNDS OF CHLORINE GAS," said the voice, with relish. "IF YE CAN'T PART WITH YER GUNS AND KEYS, CARLOS WILL FIRE UP HIS THERMAL LANCE AND TAKE 'EM OFF YOU IN TWENTY MINUTES."

"Twenty minutes?" asked Rob stupidly. "What's he mean twenty minutes?"

"YE SEE," said the voice, and here it laughed, a coarse mad laugh that jolted the hairs on their necks, "YE'LL BE EASIER TO SEARCH WHEN YER DEAD."

People are easier to threaten when they're alive. Rob and Alan had complied, crawled out of the truck, and found themselves hitchhiking to San Francisco in their underwear ten minutes later, with no leads to tell the police but some phony license plate numbers for two unmarked Mac trucks, and panicked memories of four men in gas masks and dungarees.

When the semis pulled over at their next stop, a tiny side road where the men had stashed a small fleet of getaway cars, when they'd stood clustered around the back of the trailer for the dramatic reveal and the old seadog Barbossa had unlocked and flung open the cash truck's hatch with a triumphant cry of "Feast yer eyes, gents!" then, once the lamp-lit frenzy of opening boxes of bills and defusing paint bombs had died down and settled into the steady tension of counting and adding, the band of robbers grew furious and wretched as the pair of victims.

The take was fairly pathetic.

All small bills—helpful—unmarked and non-serial—a godsend, the reason they'd picked this truck—but only just sufficient to pay for the cars, semis, and equipment, and to somewhat compensate them for the months of preparation and practice runs they'd spent on their leader's instruction. The string had been under the impression that they'd be set for life.

"Two grand," repeated Sikes.

"Two grand three, countin' the jewels in the caskets," Barbossa corrected him. He'd thought it appropriate to be the one with the calculator, to give the men the good news, but that was before they'd started counting.

"Two grand apiece for us. Four hundred for you, plus a thirty-thousand-dollar truck."

"That is the agreement." The six others had left the cash boxes and were closing in, backing Sikes. He was a big scarred man, ex-SEAL, dishonorably discharged, turned to the kidnap-and-ransom game in Mexico. Unfortunately for Barbossa, Charles Sikes had personally rounded up half the team.

Barbossa stood and spun round to put the halogen lamp at his back, his weathered face shadowed under his big fedora and the robbers squinting at him into the bright yellow glare. Sikes grinned, a knowing grin that Barbossa recognized from himself.

Out at the edge of the light, nothing but dead grass and lumpy dry trees. Between Barbossa and the cars, seven armed men, most of them killers.

"I know a guy," said Sikes. That was the problem with him; he always 'knew a guy.' "He'll give me ten grand for a five-ton truck, more for the semis. San Fran."

A change in plans this late in the heist was never a good sign. Neither was the semicircle the men advanced in. "So Charlie wants the truck. And ye expect him to share out the proceeds?" Barbossa demanded, stalking back and forth before the men, arms akimbo. "We're all disappointed—"

"You, no," said one of the Mexican contingent.

"Don't presume to know what's in me mind, boy!" Barbossa snarled.

Sikes stepped forward. "Don't get your briefs in a wad; I wanna hear what he says." He faced the speaker. "Go on."

The man swallowed and glanced around; his companions were tense, hostile—but not toward him. "You took the truck in your contract. You have American police angry with you, many many years in jail waiting for you. Sikes, we work with him, we have trust."

"Thanks, 'Nando," said Sikes. "We do have trust. We all got trust. But this guy—he's on the outside, lookin' for a way in. And that's no good."

Eyes flicking from Sikes' tense cat-smile to the cheated scowls of the bandits and American dissolutes who stood behind him, Barbossa saw a bullet in his future and decided to be the one holding the gun. His fingers whipped out his Colt and set it rock-steady in Sikes' face.

A shot roared. It wasn't his.

Not again, he couldn't help thinking, and in the instant after the shot, Sikes pulled out a nondescript 9-millimeter in his left hand and twisted the Colt away with his right. Barbossa looked left. Fast Hands, the phlegmatic American beanpole, stood slumped, a third gun dangling easily at his side.

He moved his arm, and felt a shred of his coat dragging out of a hole in the side of his chest. A hot stream followed; something fluttered in his brain, something blind and broken-winged, thrashing and clawing behind his eyes. The world started dancing.

The Latin mercenaries rounded on the shooter, snapping in Spanish, damning Fast Hands and his mother and his brother for keeping him alive. They were killers when the situation called for it, but murder was a hazard they hadn't planned for this job. Paul, the brother, grabbed on to Fast Hands' gun arm, dragging him backward. Hands allowed himself to be led, incurious as an old cow or an idiot. Crazy chit.

Barbossa would have laughed.

He stood rigidly, feet like iron weights, praying he wouldn't tip over, as the mercenaries shouted and Paul and Hands backed away toward the cars. His free hand darted for his Taurus.

Sikes got there faster, and grabbed that gun, too. Then he shoved Barbossa hard in the chest. He thudded to a seat, the wind rushing out of him, and when he tried to get the air back, it wouldn't come. He sat still, gasping shallowly.

There was a tingling in his legs, his face, the back of his throat. His heart stuttered. A breeze chilled him, lingered, began to sink into his skin. With his lungs collapsing, a deep and frustrating terror left him paralyzed as Sikes covered him with a gun, patted him down, and took his derringer, knives, and falchion.

Finally Sikes stood over him, shading him from the glaring lamp, watching the others with an affected resignation that made his obvious triumph nearly palatable. He glanced aside to watch the shouting match by the cars, gritting his jaw in annoyance. "Hey," he barked. "Yo! Muchachos! Ten-HUT!"

The mercenaries left off badgering the brothers, and trailed back over to check the stiff. They all made a watchful little ring, the three Mexicans and Sikes, the American shooters, and the odd man out, a rat-faced ex-civilian.

The Mexicans crossed themselves. They all saw there was nothing to be done; they'd made enough chest wounds to know.

Barbossa couldn't stop gasping. The hand on his wound was shivering and slick with blood. "Nice shooting, Hands," said Sikes. "Kinda wish you'd waited for my call, but it had to come to this eventually. It's nothin' we can't handle." The mercenaries looked skeptical, but Sikes shrugged them off. "He's not a contributor, y'know? Reminds me of my CO." They chuckled. "Just leave him here, Hands can scratch his gun so they don't match the bullet. We'll never hear of him again. Meet at the garage?"

Barbossa reached for an inner coat pocket with his free hand and was greeted by a volley of clicking hammers and a nest of handguns aimed at his head. Talking didn't seem to work anymore, so he turned his coat out to face them and revealed an engraved hip flask. His blood-slick right hand slid helplessly on the screw-cap.

Sikes frowned. "Now that's no fair." He gave the men a sad, sympathetic smile. "Can't deny a dying man his last drink," he said, and opened the flask with a sharp twist.

Barbossa seized it and clamped his teeth around the opening, then tipped it up, the world going hazy around him and blood bubbles plopping from his side. No time to worry about dosage. He could barely swallow.

"All right, that's enough," said Sikes, after allowing him a moment of choking and gulping, and knocked the flask to the dry grass where the last few tablespoons spilled in the dust. Barbossa smiled at him as he squeezed his hand back over his wound: a jovial grin wedded to a death glare in the eyes. He flipped Sikes the bird, and received a sharp kick in the jaw.

"Finish him?" asked Hands, cold as a dentist. His eyes were wide and dark.

"Nah," said Sikes. "He'll die. And I don't want to explain to a judge why a bullet was in his skull, ya know? Not that it'll pan out that way, but you got to leave yourself some room. Let's give him his privacy; he's earned it."

They split up, one man to a vehicle, and caravanned back to the highway, headed for a big chop-shop where they would dispose of the trucks and open the security boxes that they hadn't had the tools for. The stolen cash truck had to stay in the trailer, both for concealment's sake and because they'd gutted the dashboard in case it hid a GPS transmitter.

Dawn wasn't for another four hours. Barbossa lay on his injured side, gasping uncontrollably like a landed fish, like a kitten in a river. The lamp was gone and the cars rumbled away, and the night closed round like death.

He waited.

A half hour later, he took a deep breath in and out, stared up at the stars until they stopped fuzzing and dancing in his vision, and staggered to his feet.

The gang had stowed enough cars at the ranch for each man to ride back alone. With Barbossa down, one ratty Geo Metro was left over, waiting in the field, ready to run.

Barbossa popped the hood, hotwired it, and blazed south. He cranked up the heat, pressing one hand to the vent to beat off the chill in his core, and began to smile. His ribs ached and itched like they'd been rubbed in fiberglass, and a hacking cough dogged him down the highway, but he felt the mad laugh pulling at his throat. He'd survived the first ten minutes; by the time he reached San Fran he'd be good as new.


	2. Oops, I Did It Again

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Hit me, Baby, one more time.

When Lenny Mursthoeffe had stopped for a beer or three plus tequila at his usual bar, still in his Wells-Fargo security uniform, gotten blathering-drunk and explained on a cocktail napkin his fantasy plan for robbing and cracking a truck full of cash and deposit boxes, he would never have guessed that the scarred and bearded stranger in the pimp hat and pea coat, nursing a tumbler of neat rum, was taking him seriously. Certainly not that he himself had the guts to quit his job for crime, adventure, and easy money. If his mother knew the type of men he was now living and scheming and traveling with, she would have driven two days straight in her one-eyed Ford and come to his aid with a loaded 12-guage. Life was strange.

Lenny set down his angle grinder and twisted open a mangled steel box, not a cash box, but the sort to send heirloom jewelry to a safe-deposit in: part of the take that he hadn't managed to crack before Mr. Barbossa got shot and they had had to drive to the city and hide out in the giant steel garage. The three Latinos Sikes had recruited were crowded around looking over his shoulder; they had nothing better to do, since they hadn't just shot a man—unlike Fast Hands, standing with his face to the wall while Paul lurked nearby to guard him—and they had nothing to negotiate now—unlike Sikes, who was busy muttering with the sleepy, nervous chop-shop owner about selling the extra vehicles. Inside the box, instead of jewelry, was a metal statue about a foot tall: a man with a snake's tail, standing on a square plinth under a hoop. Lenny and his audience swore, they from disappointment and he from fear of disappointing them, and Lenny grabbed the next box.

And dropped it to the concrete with a clang.

"I have good news," boomed a far-too-familiar voice from the back doorway. They all stood at attention like meerkats, peering around the trailers. Barbossa was standing there, the left side of his coat punched through and crusty with dried blood, his ever-present fedora shading all but his beard and his crooked triumphant smile. He stretched out his arms. "Gentlemen, ye've just dodged the murder rap."

"That's impossible!" bellowed Sikes.

Not probable, thought Barbossa, before he stamped down the flashback. Instead of speaking, he stalked into the garage, letting the spring shut the door behind him.

"You had a sucking chest wound," Sikes snarled, as though Barbossa had failed him terribly by recovering.

"I got better." Barbossa noticed Sikes reaching for a spot at his hip, and whipped out a freshly stolen .44 magnum. "Though I'm not keen on gettin' another."

Sikes swallowed, and the shop owner quietly backed around the chaser semi, away from the gun and out the back door. As Barbossa approached, Sikes could see more of his face: no signs of shock or blood loss; his usual pallor was gone; a deep scar on his jaw had somehow faded. He looked healthier than Sikes had ever seen him.

He felt for the holster under his arm. "Whatcha want now? Revenge?"

"Too juvenile," Barbossa replied, slowly lowering his gun. "I just come for me cut." He finally located Hands watching from the shadow of the open trailer, and, unwilling to let the boy shoot him again, ghosted one hand in reach of a second gun under his coat. "And to celebrate our…pilot victory, as it were."

"I'll break out the champagne when we hit real money," grumbled Paul, gripping his brother by the shoulder. Sikes' Latin mercenaries muttered among themselves, agreeing. Lenny Mursthoeffe's quaver rang out above them: "How's he alive?"

Barbossa's head swung round like a turret gun, fixing first Lenny, then Fast Hands, with a toothy grin. "Same as last time and the times before that—Hell has only room for one Devil. But 'till 'tis I down in the pit, ruling the damned, I walk among ye. And we all have a fine fortune ahead of us."

"Not if—" started Sikes.

"Victory, I said," Barbossa cut him off. He strode up the trailer ramp, spreading his arms wide; all eyes flew to the blood-stained hole in his coat. "Each of you knows the value of a clean pull; never let a short-sighted fool tell you otherwise. Two months, we gave—all of you, driving and training and fitting out, fourteen-thousand-thirty in weapons and rigs—all for this, he says? For tonight, for a single prize?" He rolled his eyes at Sikes. "The roads are ours, gentlemen," he drawled. "We can strike at will: any bank, on any highway—this catch is but the first flicker of our glorious dawn."

There were a few eye-rolls, but not too many.

Sikes sidled around, into view of the other men. "So you're sayin' we should make this same grab again and again until we're caught. F that."

"This is no scam that roots a man to a town and sets the law after his heels, kidnapper!" Barbossa snapped. "We can take five trucks in five states and as many months; we nigh vanish on the roads; in a day we pick a target, the next, we're drinkin' our winnings. It's a fool that breaks up a fine outfit like this."

"I like it," announced Fast Hands in his chalky voice. Where Hands went, Paul would follow.

The mercenaries, to Sikes' consternation, were also nodding approval. Lenny sat cross-legged, clutching a strong-box, lost.

"He's got a point," Sikes announced. Indeed, he did. Sikes had always been the type to grab and run, to cooperate for a job and split the instant it was done, but the trailer-scoop was a uniquely portable engine of robbery. And since the others were interested… "But you guys know if we done it his way, we'd have just gassed the guards and we'd be in for murder—"

"Which ye were so mindful t'avoid."

"Wasn't me," said Sikes.

Fernando spoke up then; both Sikes and Barbossa tensed. They never knew what was going to come out of the man's mouth.

"You want the truck?" he asked.

That troublesome armored car again. Barbossa wished for the old days, captain to captain in a private cabin, with no hecklers to foul up the deal. He'd spent the drive to the city planning for that question. "None of ye seemed pleased to allow me the lion's share of the take, nor should ye. On me honor, that was never my intent. Instead suppose I take it south; there be a fence offered me fifteen thousand for a cash truck sight-unseen," he said, low-balling the price by a solid five-thousand, "fifteen thousand shared out equal, nearly two grand extra a man. Half-again the profit Sikes offered ye."

"That's generous," said Sikes. Damn the man: could he never let one of the other maggots put a word in first? "Yeah, I think that's friendly of him; isn't it?" He edged in toward the rest of the string, leaving Barbossa on the trailer ramp, gun dangling from crossed arms. "So your plan," he said, squinting up at him, "is to drive down with a stolen armored car with a torn-out dashboard—that would be on a trailer, wouldn't it? This one?—get your two vehicles to some spider-hole, and convince a fence to take the hot potatoes off your hands for a full fifteen grand, no questions, no screw-ups. Where do the cops show up in all this? You wanna outrun a chopper in a semi? They bring you in, you're going away for a long,long time. A guy gets desperate."

"I know how to avoid attention," Barbossa sneered.

"Nobody's that good. Nobody—you, me, nobody takes that kind of stupid risk for kicks, unless they don't know what they're doing. And you're too old for that." At least, he had been. "Hands shoots you, I kick your teeth out, and you come back here, roll over your cut, and—whatcha trying to pull?"

Sikes was glaring at him, his teeth flashing in the harsh light of the chop-shop, unfeigned suspicion in his eyes. Barbossa was taken aback to see similar expressions on the more present-minded of the men, and realized, with a shock like a nine-pounder to the gut, that he hadn't merely crossed the seesaw from miser to philanthropist in the distribution of the truck: they thought he was pulling a Sparrow. And he wasn't.

Standing on the incline leading up to the open trailer, with the men, the stacks of cash boxes, and the truck in front of him, and the exits car-lengths away to the left and right, he was exposed on all sides.

"Now what, exactly, might ye think me plannin' to do?" he demanded, descending and doing his best to loom over Sikes. "This be my break as well as yours." He advanced on the American, circling sideways until his back faced the wall. The door was clear. "Who was it took the drunken mewling of a deadbeat courier, scrapped us all together and turned it into profit? Into cash?" The robbers stared at him, stony and still as spiders.

He sauntered backward toward the door, winding into full oratorial mode, his voice rising as he prepared to retreat. "Crews like ours, ye don't find sickin' themselves in the corner tavern, waitin' on the grace o' Fortune. You gents—all of ye—you're takers. Killers, thieves, professionals. Worthy men." He passed the fender of the cash truck, and settled his grip on the gun under his elbow. "Men I been pleased o' havin' at me back."

Hands, Sikes, and the mercenaries were strung so tight together that a ripple spread through them, a twitch as though they had all brushed an electric fence. "Sell-out!" Sikes barked, as they raised their guns. Barbossa dodged behind the truck and hopped onto the rear bumper, clinging to the closed hatch. "Covering fire!" shouted Sikes, and all around the truck's edges Barbossa heard the roar and pop of bullets breaking the sound barrier.

Running for the door was out. Sniping at them without introducing his skull to their bullets was impossible. He could lock himself in the truck and hide, like a snake in a muffler, and wait for them to split with the cash or gas him out.

Or he could kill them all.

Bullets cracked in the air and pinged off girders, punched through buckets of reeking fluid and rang off the edges of the armored truck, as Carlos and Sikes edged forward, ready to flank him. Barbossa held on to the hinge of the door and pressed his face to the tiny rectangular window; he could just see bright figures standing in front of the gaping trailer doors, the fluorescents gleaming off their shoulders, shadow behind them. A crude volley crackled over his head, and he stood up, one gun popping over the edge.

For an instant, he saw Lenny staring at him, slack-jawed. Then he cocked his head and stared down the iron-sights, squeezing the .45's unfamiliar trigger: in the second before the bullets would find his skull, he sunk his mind into his gun and his wrist and the shadow of red hidden in the dark of the trailer, until the grip cracked back into his hand.

There was a roar, and something huge rammed the trailer and spun away, a red whirligig screaming and blasting smoke. It was the gas cylinder, a hundred-pound hammer flying like a loose balloon, throwing tools and wheels against the wall and clanging over the floor, a bullet-hole in one side. Barbossa was thrown back, landing on his gun and sending a bullet somewhere into the shop. He flipped around and sprinted for the door while heavy green gas licked at his heels and boots thunked after him, feeling his feet hammer the concrete and his legs spring like pistons and fire burn his throat like a stiff drink. Ah, youth.

He saw a man running after him, catching up, and he fired wildly. Sikes fell, clutching his hip. The door was before him, the roaring had stopped, the bandits were shouting in the fog, and he reached out, cranked the handle, spun, and crashed it shut with his shoulder. Other shoulders shook it, and someone tried to turn the handle from inside. Barbossa held his gun to the door and put the last of the clip through the thin metal. The struggles stopped. In the quiet dark, as he panted on the cool night air and leaned against the door, he heard them screaming.

As the first twilight greyed out the tinny stars that peeped through the streetlights' glare, as janitors drove home to bed and short-order cooks drove out to work, the fumes of a thousand swimming pools drifted down the street from the old garage, seeping through open windows and pooling into the basements, killing spiders and driving the rats to high ground. Hydrochloric acid steamed into a storm drain. The garage's great roll-down door was open, mostly, jammed near the top by a great dent where Barbossa had backed his car into it and skewered it with a crowbar to hold it shut.

The fire sprinklers were hissing, triggered when the fumes had piled to the roof. The water had dragged the gas from the air, splashing and burning plastic bottles, paint, labels, wooden handles, cotton cloth, flesh. Hands and Lenny had found gas masks. When Barbossa had finally slunk in, a damp cloth over his face and a crowbar in hand, they had still breathed—but like the dead, they didn't fight back.

The garage owner, creeping in at dawn to investigate, burned his books and drove off to stay with his cousin in Nevada.

High noon, at the Best Western in North Vacapollo, a plain white semi with matte pockmarked paint slowed outside the lobby. A horse-faced young man with a rakish feathered hat leaned out of the cab and glanced around, then filled his lungs and bellowed, "Hands to hawsers—cast off—heave!"

A capuchin monkey sprinted out of the shrubbery and bounced up the running board onto his arm, then settled himself on the passenger armrest. The windows were wide open. It sneezed.

"None o' that," said Barbossa. He pulled an old restaurant mint from one pocket and watched Jack rip it open and crunch on it like a squirrel. "T'was well worth the smell, Jack. Bastard took me pistols."

Trailering near forty thousand dollars, with a fresh face and his old associates dead in the scum quarter of San Francisco, Barbossa hummed in time to a classical station and hit the on-ramp toward Mexico.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This fiction brought to you by the movie _Payback._


	3. I Don't Know What It Is (But It Just Won't Quit)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Is it richer than diamonds, or just a little cheaper than spit?

Stalking across the weathered oak planks of the Mandoline's waterfront dining room, Rhiannon was pleasantly surprised how the Seattle restaurant had weathered the thirty years since she'd seen it last—changed, but not aged, rather like herself. The place had scaled up, if that were possible, with fresh wall sconces and a three-page wine list, but retained the familiar mood lighting, faceted goblets, and creased black livery on the waiters. Her sharp heels drove, thock, thock, thock, into the wood, and she searched the diners' faces as she walked. She wore her scariest black pantsuit, with a hint of a plunging turquoise blouse under a fitted blazer.

She noticed a familiar red dress at a table across the room.

It was burgundy, actually, a shade she adored, in silk that flamed in the dim light and a cut that transformed any woman into a queen, a starlet, a fine lady. She dated it to the forties, but the style transcended fashion. She'd seen that dress before.

The woman wearing the dress was not familiar. She sat a bit stiffly, uneasily in it, glancing at her plate of scallops with confusion, and crossing and uncrossing her ankles. Her smoky makeup gave her a distinctly rented air. Her companion wore a sort of leisure suit forty years out of date and far too flashy, complete with a green pimp hat, but with his young face—twenty-five to thirty, she guessed—it became a fashion statement, not a fossil.

She crossed his line of sight, and at his nod, approached the table and pulled out an empty chair. "You look extremely well tonight," she greeted him, puzzled. She knew the years wore hard on him: whether through hard living or a weak liver, he often seemed a bit yellow around the eyes, and his face was always gouged and battered; he aged badly. Yet occasionally she found him bright-eyed and smooth-skinned, or with an entirely new set of scars, the old ones missing. She, who never scarred after an injury—and never got wrinkles, arthritis, or old age at all, for that matter—was mystified that the man would surrender to time like any mortal, then jerk backwards to a clean slate. Perhaps he periodically refreshed himself on the blood of the living; it would fit his sense of humor. She offered her hand, and a business card. "Rhiannon Hartson."

"Clearly," said the young-looking Barbossa, shaking it firmly. Something was off about her face. The nose: small and sharp. "I'm sellin' a truck."

"The one we discussed in May?"

"Which else?" He leaned back in his chair and grinned, draping an arm around the girl in the dress. "Be mighty bold to take two such prizes in a month, Miss Hartson. Even for me."

She smiled and nodded. "Where is it now?"

"Safe. In the heart o' law-abidin' Los Angeles. But there be in addition…" He cocked his head at her.

"Something elegant and strange, impossible to pawn," she finished. "If you would describe it for me?"

"Look for yerself." He reached into his coat.

Rhiannon took the Polaroid he handed her. In a half-open steel box, with a twenty-dollar bill beside it for scale, was a cunning bronze, a coiling form set in a horse-shoe of stylized brambles, ornamented with clinging bracelets and an elaborate mane of twisting hair. A male, with the lower body of a snake. Indian. She couldn't give it a date.

"Once I confer with my contacts, once I have the piece in hand…" she began, vanishing the photo into her clutch.

"Ten thousand, in me hands by dawn. Take it or leave it."

"A bit drastic. I wouldn't know if it were a tin cast."

Barbossa picked up a vicious, snipe-nosed ivory-handled dagger, and speared a bit of duck from his stew. "Ye and I," he said, chewing, "deal from a position of trust. Ye make an appraisal; I trust ye. I propose a meetin'; ye trust me. T'would be foolish of me to injure that trust, for a measly ten thousand."

"Unless this is our last meeting," said Rhiannon irritably.

"Ye think so?" he asked, flicking the dagger.

Rhiannon sighed. "No," she said firmly. "No, I don't. But acquiring ten thousand in cash—my home is across the Pacific now—would put me quite out of my evening, and I have other meetings tomorrow. And as you say—I make the appraisal. You suggest. As it stands, you may find yourself pawning it for fifty."

"Judgin' from the chest it was stowed in, it be well worth ten thousand," said Barbossa. "Or I kin toss it out. As you see," and he gave the passive girl beside him a squeeze, "I'm no pauper."

"If 'tis priceless as you say, any research will favor your pockets. But if you must sell it tonight, I fear I must make you a much lower offer."

"More pity to ye, then."

"And also to you."

"Ye plannin' to talk me down, or whine all evenin' about it?"

Rhiannon sniffed. "If you must sell it tonight, I make you the offer once I examine the piece. Give me ten days to ask about, and you can set the price yourself. I know you're in no hurry; you already waited two weeks for your letter to reach me."

Letters to Rhiannon's old identities were forwarded into a post-office box an ocean away. The name Barbossa had written to had been officially dead twenty years.

"Two days," said Barbossa, in a tone that brooked no opposition.

"A week. At the very least."

"Two and a half, or I throw it in the Sound. I can't be seen pawning the thing; t'would put the uniforms after me. Take it or leave it."

Rhiannon pulled out her Blackberry and checked her appointments for the next three days. "That will…work. Barely. The twenty-second, between six and nine in the morning?"

"Make it seven. Meet me at Pike's Place by the fish stalls." He grinned as she wrinkled her nose.

"You have a peculiar way to treat a lady." She glanced at his girl, whom she'd been ignoring for the whole conversation. "My compliments on the apple dumplin' cart," she said, appraising the girl's dye-job.

"Aye, it suits," he said. He made perfect eye contact, but Rhiannon still felt he was undressing her with his eyes. Even young, he had an unshakable aura of dirty old man.

"Though I must say," she continued, "and take this how you will—I believe the dumplin's have been leavened, in this case."

"Leavened."

"Puffed. Adulterated," Rhiannon explained, sweeping the girl's cleavage with a clinical eye.

The girl looked around, alarmed. "Your wife's here?" she hissed in Barbossa's ear. By her lips and hands, Rhiannon realized, she was not a girl at all and had to be about twenty-five.

"Wife? Ha!" He noted her puzzled face. "Adulterated. Means somethin' quite different from adultery." He reached for her wine glass. "If I may, miss?"

She nodded, though, being paid, she could hardly refuse.

Barbossa held up the half-full glass of rosé and swirled it, then added a generous dollop of gravy from his stew. "I've just adulterated your wine." He handed the glass back and she stared down at it in dismay. He turned back to Rhiannon, taking a sip of his own wine and smacking his lips. "So ye know, I like me apple dumplin's like I like me apples—fresh. Don't matter where they're grown or…fabricated."

Rhiannon's expensive nose twitched. "How old are you?" she asked the girl.

"Nineteen," she replied guardedly.

"I'd say you're considerably staler."

The girl reddened, and Barbossa covered her ears with his hands and gave Rhiannon a reproachful look. "Well now ye've gone and spoilt her evenin. Innocent ears. And we've the opera t'see yet."

_"Figaro?"_

He gave her a nasty grin. "Why, ye want to wear the dress?"

The rented girl clutched the dress around her shoulders, as though Barbossa was about to rip it off her and put it on Rhiannon right there in the restaurant. Rhiannon clenched her fists on her chair arms and let her gritted teeth show him what she thought of the idea.

Barbossa smiled amiably. "O'course, it be hard t'enjoy the singin' while yer cattin' about in me ear about the swell o' the sopranos' stuns'ls."

Rhiannon scowled. "Well. It's been pleasant, Mr. Barbossa." She took up her purse to leave their table. "Enjoy your doxy."

"Likewise."

Rhiannon left in a huff, and failed to tip both her waiter and her taxi driver that evening.

Two and a half days later, however, she happily paid Barbossa thirteen thousand for the Indian bronze, plus twenty more for the truck. Fencing antiquities was all about knowing the right people, and one Singaporean shipping mogul would apparently give half his kingdom to recover a certain figurine recently lost in transit from a bank in California.


End file.
